Burrito for Two
by lespetitesmorts
Summary: Beca works at home and hasn't left her house in a while because she's hella sick. Chloe is her neighbour who hasn't seen her in a while and thinks she might be dead.


"I need three more hours, Theo, and then it's good to send, alright?" Beca says through speakerphone, fingers moving dials across her mixing board, one earphone off her ear just enough for her to make out what the guy's saying.

"Beca, the deadline is in thirty minutes and you're supposed to be here to present it to the artist!"

Beca pushes one of her equalizer bars half an inch too far, curses under her breath, and then fixes it. "Theo, just tell the client the truth – I've been sick and things are taking me a little longer than usual, but it'll be there. Once they know I might be contagious, they won't want to see me anyway," she says confidently, adjusting a lever to correct the timbre.

"Beca," he says, and she rolls her eyes at his exasperated tone.

"I've never let Timberlake down before, he'll understand."

"But–"

"Theo, do we have to go over this every time? Who. Is. Your. Boss?"

She can hear grumbles in the background as she hits pause on the song and slips her earphones down to her neck. "I couldn't hear that?" she prompts.

"You are," he finally says, begrudgingly.

"Right, so you're going to do what?" she can't help a small smirk from crossing her face envisioning his pained turtle expression.

He audibly sighs. "I'm going to tell Justin Timberlake that we need to postpone our meeting by two and a half hours and that you're too sick to come in. I will also say that we are sorry, but you've been sick and haven't been able to work quite as quickly as usual."

"Good." Beca's finger moves to hover over the "end call" button on her phone. "Bye." It slams onto the screen.

She puts the phone off to the side, gives herself a little shake, and then stops because it sounds weirdly like someone is knocking on her front door.

Why is this weird? Because she has a small red indicator light on her porch so her friends and family know when she's busy and they can either leave her alone or enter the house using the passcode they've been assigned. She's given a different one to each person and a message telling her who's here flashes across the bottom righthand corner of her computer screen.

Everyone who could possibly visit her knows not to bug her. So who's at the door?

She pulls her blanket tighter around her red panda onesie and walks over to the little CCTV display in the corner of her recording studio. It's not someone super familiar to Beca; it takes almost ten seconds of staring for her to recognize the redheaded woman as one of her neighbours. Beca shrugs and goes back to her booth.

Two hours and fifty-two minutes later, she drops the song file onto the record label's secure server and slips her earphones off.

"Riot," she says, and her phone flickers to life. "Text Turtle."

"_Texting Turtle."_

"Boom! It's uploaded."

"_Texting Turtle, 'Boom! It's uploaded.' Do you wish to send?"_

"Send."

"_Message sent."_

She smiles triumphantly and pulls off her headphones. She stretches her limbs out and gets up, fixing her blanket as she goes. At the door she flicks off the studio light and exits into her hallway.

_Knock, knock, knock_.

"Bloody hell," Beca mutters as someone continues to tap on her door. She'd been hoping to boil some water, make some tea, and then crawl into bed for another week. She smiles wistfully at the thought of having Theo cancel her week's appointments.

Instead of curling up in bed and texting him her plan, she veers toward her front door instead. The camera display in her entrance hall shows the same redheaded neighbour. Beca grumbles, unlocks the door, and pulls it open.

The woman stares at her in shock.

Self-consciously, Beca wraps the blanket more securely around herself.

"Oh my," the woman says. "Are you alright?"

"No," Beca says. "This crazy lady's been banging on my door for the past, like, three hours."

Blushing furiously, the woman says, "In my defense, after I knocked the first time I went home for a bit and only just now came back."

"Okay, but no offence, why are you here?"

The blush only deepens.

"Okay, so I know this is going to sound, like, totes stalkery, but I haven't seen you in like two weeks. Usually I see you every afternoon holding a takeout cup of coffee from Swan's Beans because I teach piano lessons and my piano is in front of my living room window. And, well, I haven't seen you for a long, long time so I thought maybe something had happened to you and I just wanted to make sure that you were okay."

Beca blinks a couple of times in rapid succession at the spiel the woman before her has churned out. "Right, so I'm Beca… What's your name again?"

"Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, it's Chloe," she says and it seems like maybe she'll leave it there, but instead she continues, "and now that I know you're alive, I will totally get out of your hair."

Beca opens her mouth to say goodbye, but all that comes out is a violent series of coughs that she barely manages to direct into her elbow before doubling over to wheeze.

A hand rubs the middle of Beca's back and Beca's coughing subsides. She straightens up only to face an inquisitorial squad, population Chloe.

"Do you have enough tea? Have you been consuming enough liquids? What have you been eating? Have you been getting groceries if you haven't been leaving your house?" the questions come rapid-fire, making Beca's head spin.

"What?" Beca asks, dumbfounded.

"Okay, I can whip you up a soup in no time, my mom passed down a great recipe, let's just get you some tea and then I'll go home and fix it up and bring you some." Chloe steps into the house, gently pushing Beca back into her home.

"Dude, I'm fine!" Beca protests, catching her blanket once again as it tries to fall off of her.

All Chloe says is, "Cute onesie," but her step never falters. "Where's your kitchen?"

On auto-pilot, Beca gestures to the right, and Chloe keeps shepherding them both there. She makes Beca sit at one of the island chairs and then looks around for a kettle. A box of lemon ginseng green tea is open on the counter beside a bowl of lemons, half a lemon on a juicer, a tub of honey with a spoon sticking out of it, and the kettle.

"Perfect, this stuff should really help your throat," Chloe comments as she starts making Beca tea.

"Dude, what is happening right now? I'm fine, you can just go home."

A brief flash of hurt crosses Chloe's face, and Beca almost feels guilty, but almost as quickly as it appeared, it vanishes. "You're sick, you've been sick for, what, two weeks? You need some help."

"I do not."

"Do too."

"Do not!"

Chloe rolls her eyes. "Well, you're getting some anyway, sweet cheeks, so deal with it."

Beca mumbles under her breath.

"What was that?" Chloe asks as she opens various cabinets. Finally, she pulls a mug from the cabinet beside the fridge.

"I could get my security team here in ten minutes and you wouldn't be able to escape the law."

"That's cute, sweetie, but I'm not going anywhere until I make you a nice pot of tea. And then I'm coming back with soup so that you actually eat something."

"I've been eating!" Beca says defensively.

"Oh yeah?" Chloe challenges, raising an eyebrow. Like she has a sixth sense, she heads straight for the trash bin. "And you think eating a dozen packages of instant cheese ramen is going to cure you, do you?"

Beca blushes. "I – they're easy to make and the freeze-dried vegetables inside don't suck like most other instant ramens I've tried. So I won't die of scurvy which is at the top of my to-do list, and it has a nice little spice kick at the end to help my sinuses."

Before Beca's even done trying to justify her major cheese ramen kick, Chloe's shaking her head. "You need fresh veggies and vitamins, some protein wouldn't hurt, and some people find dairy – if we can call this dairy – worsens cold and flu symptoms."

Blinking widely, Beca says, "Okay…?"

"Don't worry about it, I'll take care of it. You should go up to bed and try to sleep or at least rest. I'll bring your tea up, head home and make some soup, then bring you some dinner in a couple of hours." Then she turns around, expecting Beca to just acquiesce. A rookie mistake.

"Dude, I don't even know you!"

Chloe turns back around, "My name's Chloe Beale, I live across the street, we've been neighbours for like two years, I went to Barden University and co-captained the all-female a cappella group The Barden Bellas, I had a 3.7 GPA in education, and then moved here and became a piano teacher. My favourite colour is orange, "Titanium" is my jam, and I love to give toasts at group events." She smiles. "Now we're friends and you know all about me, so please go upstairs!"

"You know 'Titanium'?" Beca asks, totally distracted.

"Have I been living under a rock? It's great. The song really builds."

"Yeah, he's really good at incorporating those rises and falls," Beca comments, almost absently.

"Go!" Chloe demands again as the kettle clicks off. "I'll bring this to you, just go rest; you look kind of awful."

"Thanks, you forgot to mention you're really nice in your elevator pitch," Beca grumbles, but starts walking upstairs anyway.

"I'm making you soup and tea – it's implied, Beca!"

When she gets upstairs, Beca pulls open her thick duvet and climbs in, still wrapped up in her onesie and extra blanket. She burritos under all her layers as best as she can. It takes a few minutes of turning and adjusting, but she eventually discovers that if she props herself up on a couple of pillows and rotates slightly so her head is on an angle to allow sinus drainage, she can almost breathe normally without triggering her cough too much.

Chloe appears in the doorway a few moments later, carrying a mug which she sets down on the coaster on Beca's bedside table after picking up an old mug.

"Oh, thanks," Beca says quietly.

"You look pretty snuggly," Chloe comments, surveying the very large pile of blankets. "Are you warm in there?"

"Not really."

"Alright, I can help with that," Chloe says as she walks around to the other side of the bed.

"Wait, what?" Beca says as her eyes follow Chloe's movements. It takes much longer than it should for Beca to put two and two together, and Chloe is already sliding under the covers towards Beca when Beca says, "Dude, what are you doing?"

Chloe just smiles in what Beca assumes Chloe thinks is a reassuring way. "You're never going to get warm, even with all these blankets, if you're cold. The blankets just insulate the temperature. Yes, they can help trap heat, but you need heat to get that started. I, as a healthy normal person, am quite warm in this pseudo-tropic you've designed for yourself, so if I can help warm you and your little cocoon, you might actually feel warm for once since nothing else is helping."

An arm wraps around Beca's waist, on top of the blanket she's wrapped up in under her duvet. And, as much as it might pain Beca to admit, even to herself, it's kind of nice. And that spot actually does feel a little warmer. Her eyelids start drooping a little.

"Okay, fine, but no copping any feels, ginger," Beca says, her words already blurring at the edges with sleep.

"Scout's honour!" Chloe promises.

It's mumbled and very quiet, but Beca manages to get out, "I doubt you were ever a scout," before drifting off. Chloe laughs softly and inches forward to cuddle Beca better.

"Good guess," Chloe comments, and then despite her plans to go home and make Beca soup, she finds herself acquiescing to the soporific atmosphere, and falling asleep too.


End file.
